


Tightrope

by Crazy_Comet_97



Series: "Marvel" At This [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Captain America never happened, Gift Fic, M/M, Military Families, Mpreg, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Soldier Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers is Not Captain America, War, World War II, completed work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:34:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26642263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crazy_Comet_97/pseuds/Crazy_Comet_97
Summary: ”A pregnant guy in the 1930's living in a tiny apartment by himself and having to work a really laborious job cause he's short on cash, but he's doing all he can to bring his child into a good home.”A snapshot of Steve Rogers trying to hold together his life at the seams without Bucky while the war rages on and unexpected problems arise.Gift for @funnylittlecreature on Tumblr.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: "Marvel" At This [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2008342
Comments: 2
Kudos: 70





	Tightrope

He shouldn't have been working that day.

Actually, he shouldn’t have been working that week either, to begin with.

Honestly, he should have ceased working come August when winter started to nip at the heels of Pennsylvania, but when your best friend and former lover was currently away at war, working was easy, even for someone as sickly and broke as shit as Steven Grant Rogers.

Despite long, dreary days in which his already wheezing lungs protested every movement he made and his head and back ached fiercely even before the day started, he had to keep going. Work as well as money came to no man easily, especially ones in his current condition if they somehow still held a job of any description.

Steve looked at himself in the mirror with a sigh, hands and skin stained in the black dust of coal and ash from working near the railroad, his ears ringing from the many horns blaring past him at the speed of sound. His once white shirt was streaked in lines and smudges where the dirt and grime from the day had settled on them and between the parted unbuttoned sections, Steve's hands gently cupped a large sphere made of flesh, red lines spiraling across it like a tanned hide as his fingers gently ran over them.

He often wondered if this was how his mother felt when she had been watching him grow in her body. If there was one thing Sarah Rogers had loved, it was children.

Sometimes if he closed his eyes, he could see that old rundown tin and brick house in the middle of a busy Brooklyn street, his brothers and sisters clawing at the fences and stones like rats in the greeting of each other from either school or work happily, not even caring about their bare feet or their skinny bodies adorned with rags and too big trousers that had been passed down from one child to the next. He had wanted to ring his mother or simply show up at his childhood home and be swept into her loving arms, but he knew he couldn’t.

She didn’t need another burden on her. His siblings, all somehow healthier then he’d ever been, were enough for her to bare. A quite heavily pregnant son with a male partner out of the country would not be welcomed by neighbors or assist her in that endeavor.

The apartment always felt so lonely, especially in the evenings and first morning light when he first opened or lastly closed his eyes. The small dark hallways and echoing, creaking wooden floors despite him and Bucky having lived here since they were 17 had never really left him in peace lately, haunting him without the warm presence of his boyfriend standing or lying around to sequester it all away and leave him comfortable in his own skin.

Bucky had been there through everything. The seizures, the asthma attacks, his one heart attack when he was 15, he’d been there, with him.

Now he wasn’t and it just seemed so unfair.

The war, in itself a bad thing, had taken away this experience from them both, in a way.

For Steve, it was the day in day out at the railroad and the coal sheds, hauling and coughing and wheezing away to save money for when this baby decided in her wisdom, to make her grand appearance sometime in November when she was ready and willing and healthy.

For Bucky, it had meant that being deployed, he would miss everything, including knowledge of the little one as well.

While soldiers could write letters in their stride, they could not be replied back to without the proper materials and the hurriedness of knowing that their unit would be moved soon after to another area. Steve had known this would happen, as they had both applied for the Army together when ol’ Hitler made a fuss, but only Bucky got in, much to the other’s dismay.

They had gone on one last date, dancing under the stars to some melody that had been on the radio, the woman’s voice echoing i h is head about never letting go before ending up back in their bed, which he was currently sitting on in the present, following a foot or a knee that was poking out in protest of him cramping the occupant’s space as he chuckled.

She had been most likely conceived that night and given her stubbornness and tenacity that has already made itself known to him, he hopes she’s exactly like Buck, all the way down to her bones. He didn't know if he could handle seeing and tending to a sickly baby such as he was on his own.

He can just imagine a little blue-eyed baby girl, with brown ringlets watching him or better, greeting Bucky when he came.home off that damn boat that had taken him away, smile beaming and pudgy cheeks and fingers as pink as her lips grasping onto his uniform as soon as he got close enough, so surprised to see her, but already so in love, the whispering ghost of kissing his forehead as the daydream drifts away and leaves him back in reality with its snow, darkness and blaring horns.

He has no doubt if Buck were here, things would be a lot different.

For now, he rises from the bed to take the rest of his work clothes from his person and with a quick bath (in which his back will smart thanks to the weight he’s carrying in front pulling on it) and an even quicker meal (Bucky always was the better cool out of the two of them, we'll, three now), he finds himself in bed with his back facing the frosted over window and a hand dipping into the side of the mattress, the other around the bump as he watches the clock, eyes finally slipping a hut, only to dream about the man he loved.

Dreaming of the day he would finally come home to them and they could be a family, a new one, a loving one, together.


End file.
